


A ficlet

by darksylvia



Category: Numb3rs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-12-22
Updated: 2005-12-22
Packaged: 2017-10-03 16:01:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 954
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darksylvia/pseuds/darksylvia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is a gapfiller for the arsonist episode.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A ficlet

The air smelled like cooked meat and ozone. When Charlie came striding up, full of clean scientific purpose, Don hadn't even thought about it--he'd stepped right in front of Charlie, headed him off, prepared to become a shield. It was instinctive. Charlie had seen anyway. A burnt body was hard to hide, and the smell impossible. There was some small corner of his mind (when he let himself think about things like this) that sneered at the way he was still trying to protect Charlie from the bullies, from the bad things, protect him even from Don himself. Charlie _was_ a grown man, Don would tell himself, even if he looked so young. Instinct didn't answer to reason.

But, story of his life, he didn't have the time to really do anything about Charlie and what he might have seen. There was an arsonist to catch and _lives_ depended on it. Which was kind of a sick joke, sometimes. _Lives_ were anonymous, ambiguous, unquantifiable, until the future came and smacked Don upside the head with their reality, their worth. Then they were quantifiable, useful to Charlie, and maybe detrimental, too. Counting bodies should not be what Charlie was using his considerable brain power for.

Anyway, _lives_ weren't the real reason Don did his job. Saving them was a part of it, he supposed. He knew that had definitely been a motivation at some point--more before running down fugitives, before he'd personally taken so many of them. Now it was more the solving of the problem, apprehension of the villains, doing his job. He and Charlie at least had that in common: the drive to solve.

Sometimes, in the lull between cases, Don wondered what else he was made of. When he wasn't working, he didn't really do anything.

He hated being between cases.

But when he came home and found Charlie, worried over mundane _safe_ professor stuff, the in between was less horrible. Every lull was a period of grace where Charlie wasn't being shot at, or seeing the dead, or unwittingly talking with potential killers. Don tried to protect Charlie, but most times he didn't do so well.

Don hadn't been to his apartment in days because the first three nights after the arson, he'd been climbing the stairs to Charlie's room and throwing himself into Charlie-smelling sheets, whether or not he was actually in bed. Charlie would be in the garage, or conducting some strange experiment with Larry, an Astronomy class, or for one of Don's own cases. Sometimes it was even for the shadowy _other_ organizations that sometimes contacted Charlie, the NSA being the least shadowy of them and Charlie would get a secretive look on his face and not say anything. Don knew Charlie hadn't told him about all of it. He liked to wait until those cases could spring up and bite Don in the ass.

But It didn't really matter where Charlie had been. What mattered was the part where he'd come home, kick his clothes into a corner, and crawl in warm and sleepy next to Don. Where he'd bury his head against Don until only the curls were visible, sigh, and pass out. Don always woke up with ink or chalk smears on his chest, and if he was lucky, a leg thrown over him and a lightly snoring Charlie keeping him warm.

When the arsonist tried to kill the firefighters and made himself into a serial killer, the case came to a temporary stand-still. Don finally went back to his apartment, watered his lone plant (it had been a gift from some woman he'd dated months ago and was it supposed to be brown at the tips?) changed his clothes, threw out the credit card applications, and found himself standing unmoving in his kitchen. He couldn't _do_ anything until the next day, when his team would be back at work, cracking away at the suspects, at the factors, at the possibilities. His refrigerator held old pizza, something that once might have been lettuce, and no beer.

He hated stand-stills, too. They were as bad as the part in-between cases, but with an extra edge of unrest lodged in his chest, screaming at him that the fucker who was burning up buildings and bodies was still out there.

Almost without conscious effort, he found himself in his car and on the way to his dad's--well, technically Charlie's. He always parked in the same spot and he always glanced up to see if Charlie's light was on, and he always had to jiggle the knob to get it open, and the smell of old house, of _home_ always knocked away the unrest for a few minutes of blessed relief.

His dad was sitting on the couch, watching something on the discovery channel. He looked up at Don's approach. "Hey!" he said, "What are you doing here?"

"What, I can't just come and visit?"

"Ah, so you were bored at home, were you? That's why you should get a girlfriend. Then you wouldn't have to hang out with your father on weeknights."

"Hey, who said I was coming to hang out with you?" Don smiled, ignoring the girlfriend comment almost without conscious thought, he'd done it so many times. "Where's Charlie?"

His father waved a dismissive hand. "In the garage, I think with Larry."

"Has he eaten dinner?"

"Who knows? Make him eat, anyway. He forgets too often."

"Okay, dad," he said, already on his way to the garage. If he was lucky, Charlie would be working on the case and Don could forget again, for a little while, that there was anything else to life but Charlie and solving problems one at a time.


End file.
